Why&How

=Why and How=


 * Why**
 * I needed to work on a meaningful project as part of completing my Master's degree in secondary education. I have frequently been frustrated by the inefficiency of online resources for English teachers. I love what Jim Burke has been doing on English Companion Ning but wanted to create a smaller, more focused collaborative resource inspired by some of the discussion and ideas in that forum (http://englishcompanion.ning.com/).
 * Other Reasons:
 * I am frequently frustrated by two related problems as an English teacher:
 * 1) Online resources for English texts are used as commercial “hooks”, are poorly organized, and/or are not up to date and contain several dead links.
 * 2) As a secondary English teacher for the last eight years I am constantly impressed by my co-workers discoveries of creative and relevant resources (many of them online), but we do not have a good system for sharing them and rarely have time to sit down and swap ideas.
 * I have also been far too content to use other peoples ideas from online resources but never bold enough to contribute my own. SETRR will force me to be more involved in the wide world of English teachers and more actively exchange ideas and help facilitate that exchange for others.
 * I want to model some specific behaviors I encourage in my students:
 * Collaboration
 * More careful assessment of online resources
 * Being **producers**, not just **consumers** of content.

**How**
> ====http://www.itiscannizzaro.net/Ianni/booksweb/sitodarkness/home/index.htm).====
 * ====I have worked with 4 teachers in my English department over the last couple of years attempting different methods of organizing resources. We have currently settled on the categories I used in the "Leveled Tables". There is some overlap in these categories, but we have come to feel that they are specific enough to be helpful in organizing resources, but broad enough that they inspire new ideas and are not too limiting.====
 * ====I used some resources from printed "booklists" we have generated as a department (about 5%).====
 * ====I overwhelmingly conducted my own research to create SETRR. I looked up everything from how to manage online forums (looked at "Partners in Learning", English Companion Ning, and excellent teacher designed websites like the one by Sue Sumerford [http://elenawee.pbworks.com/w/page/18752737/FrontPage ]) to online communities dedicated to specific novels or authors (the Cormac McCarthy Society at http://www.cormacmccarthy.com, or a three school collaborative site dedicated to "Heart of Darkness":====
 * ====This was exhausting work and I was tempted to simply use resources already categorized from Webenglishteacher,com or ECN but I really wanted to start with clean, original and updated resources so that SETRR would not fall victim to some of the problems that show up on those larger sites.====
 * ====One of the hardest parts was formatting links and tables in a web friendly manner. Pasting all this information into a MS Word table would have taken far less time but I knew that having resources visible online was worth the effort.====
 * ====I know that I will have at least 4 new members of SETRR as the school year begins and my co-workers sign up. At the least SETRR will be a useful place for us to store ideas and discuss resources. I plan on "advertising" our existence in ECN and other subject appropriate online forums over the course of this year and hope to have 10-20 users on SETRR by the end of the school year. This will decrease the amount of research I will have to do in terms of adding resources but it will increase the time spent managing the site. Fortunately I have designed SETRR in a way that makes it easy to add content and additional sub pages as necessary.====

//Please let me know what you think by sending comments or questions to "**ROPETOW**" through the MyMail link in wikispaces or email me directly at zhayden@gmail.com.//
-Zack Hayden, August 2011